Don’t Sell Your Online Course Without These 4 Things

I’ve always wanted to have a good answer for this problem, but could never give one in good conscience.

Why?

Because every time I set out to assemble a recommended tools list for building paid online courses, I run into problems. I tried many times, but I never found a solution that addressed my 4 critical concerns.

More...

What Every Online Course Solution Needs

Whatever solution you end up with, there are a few points you can't do without. What you need is:

A simple way to create online courses that look and feel like online courses (and not just blog posts or regular pages). This is critical for the perceived value of your product.

A way to receive payments and make sure that only people who paid can access your course.

A solution for digital sales tax (e.g. the EU VAT MOSS regulations).

An affiliate marketing system, so that you can get other people to promote your product for you.

I was never satisfied with that because A) these solutions are usually very expensive and B) the more different stuff you have to patch together, the more complicated and costly the whole thing becomes.​

In my own experience, I've always had to pay for custom development and integration, to get it all to work. On this very website, we use a tool stack that costs us around $300/month and we've invested well over $20,000 in development cost over the years, to make it all work, keep it tax compliant etc.

Clearly, I can't recommend something like this as an optimal solution.

The Digital Tax Problem

EU VAT on digital products have been in effect since 2015 and affect all businesses, worldwide. Other countries are following suit and implementing similar digital tax schemes.

Despite this, most membership plugins and online selling solutions don't make any effort to be compliant. The best you can usually hope for is that they integrate with some compliance platform.

I can't recommend a solution that isn't tax compliant. That's just hanging a Sword of Damocles above your head exposing you to potential legal ramifications down the road.

For those reasons, I’ve avoided recommending a paid online course tool stack to help you sell online courses on your WordPress website… until now.

Since we launched our Thrive Apprentice online course plugin to Thrive Themes Members back in 2017, users have always had the ability to quickly craft and launch professional looking lead generation Ecourses to help grow their email lists.

​We also integrate with several membership plugins, but those solutions are generally incomplete or expensive.

Now, we finally have a solution we can fully stand behind. We created a deep integration between Thrive Apprentice and SendOwl. Now Thrive Members have an easy and affordable way to solve all four of the business-critical issues discussed at the beginning of this post.

In short, SendOwl is the ideal solution to start selling your first online courses with because:

It handles payment processing.

With our integration, Thrive Apprentice makes sure that only customers access the courses they bought.

It has a built in system for collecting digital sales tax and creating tax reports.

It has a simple but useful, built-in affiliate program.

It's affordable, with prices starting at just $9/month.

​I think signing up for a $2,000 tool stack to sell your first course is an extraordinarily bad idea, which is why that last point is quite important to me, as well. With SendOwl and Thrive Apprentice, you can get started at a low price and the solution can also continue growing with you for some time to come.

Watch the video above to find out and make sure to leave any comments or questions you have about it below!

P.P.S.: At the time of this writing, Thrive Apprentice is still only available to Thrive Members. We are aiming for a public launch in Q1 2019. Until then, you must be a Thrive Member to access this plugin.

0
Shares

Author: Shane Melaugh

Shane Melaugh is a co-founder and the CEO of Thrive Themes. When he isn't plotting new ways to create awesome WordPress themes & plugins, he likes to geek out about camera equipment and medieval swords. He also writes about startups and marketing here.

But send owl doesn’t include a membership site option – you still need to buy that in as it lists those plug ins it integrates with. I like the pdf stamping but with other cart solutions already in place I can’t see the magic.

With Thrive Apprentice, you don’t need an additional membership plugin to make it work. At least as long as you simply want to sell some online courses. Then, Thrive Apprentice + SendOwl is all you need.

Hello, I am about to film my first course. Sounds like apprentice and send owl is all i need – but I keep hearing about needing membermouse or similar to drip content. Plus, I need to do lead magnets. Do i still need a mail service (if so which is recommended), or will sendowl do that too?

This is really interesting, Shane & team. I’ve been paying for Thinkific for a couple of years, but as not made many sales, looking for a more economical solution. Thrive Architect is way superior to Thinkific’s editor, which is one positive, but above all, it would be much better to have the whole of my environment within one tool, rather than having to build ‘matching’ landing pages etc in both places.
Thanks so much :)

Hi Shane,
I’ve noticed that your business is located in Switzerland which is legally out of the European Community. So how do you go about paying your VAT taxes when you trade globally? Do you have to pay VAT according to where your customers live ? How does it work?

No matter where a business is located, VAT must be paid to the countries in which your customers live. In the EU, there is a “one stop shop” solution for this, where you basically pay all the taxes owed to all the EU member states to a single entity. But really, the answer is: you need to have a solution that calculates and charges the appropriate tax rate and then creates a file which you hand over to your accountant.

I’m so delighted that you have created this deep integration with SendOwl. Being based in Ireland and VAT registered, the importance of VAT compliance was something that I was fully aware of but didn’t have a solution for when selling on a global scale. – So I have been putting it off… until now!

I am now planning my next course and look forward to implementing it with Thrive Apprentice + SendOwl.

Brilliant info, as always, Shane. Thank You. I applaud you for talking about a crucial topic that I don’t believe I have heard anyone else in the IM space address :)

This is a great start but I would like to see it taken even further. I am currently using a dedicated platform to sell online courses. It’s not cheap but it also integrates email marketing and ties everything together with just one click. Let me explain.

When i am ready to offer a new online course, I tell them software that what kind of course I am offering (mini-course, full featured, etc). It then creates all the pieces and ties them together. The website is created. The email marketing autoresponder sequence is created. The shopping cart is created. The affiliate program and links are created. All I need to do is modify the elements to personalize the site.

This is really convenient and makes it easy to launch a new course. While I am very fluent in WordPress (have been creating WordPress sites for more than 10 years), I find this dedicated platform makes it much less stressful to launch a course.

Hopefully someday Thrive Themes will be able to duplicate such a system. You’re already half way there….

Thank you! I actually teach people how to create online courses and online group coaching programmes / training programmes. I’ve been asked the same questions many times, and I’ve had the exact same problem with responding. So far my answer was – Teachable. I use Teachable and I’ve been recommending it to others. But so many people (myself included) want to self-host their courses, and there simply wasn’t a good solution for them. So thank you! I’ll definitely explore this option!

Thanks for the update, Shane. And thanks too, for not shoving a mish-mash of cobbled together online course solutions that are too difficult to implement and too expensive to afford. By the way, I also appreciate your stance on running a legal online business.

I don’t think the quantity of members is the part that doesn’t scale. If you sell one or several courses with this solution to 100 or 100K people, you’d still be fine. I think where you’d reach limits of scale are more likely to be factors like the affiliate program (maybe you want to set up more sophisticated systems of offers, affiliate tiers etc.) or the nature of products (selling ongoing memberships with multiple levels, creating a marketplace,…).

I think SendOwl plus Thrive Apprentice works well for as long as you just want to sell individual courses.

The problem with this is that it’s extremely limited in terms of payment gateways:
– Paypal
– Stripe – which supports a limited no of countries, otherwise you cannot integrate it with SendOwl.
– other payment options which are irrelevant.

In my case, I cannot use it as I live in Central Europe, not supported by Stripe. Only having Paypal integrated is not an option.

I’m not sure where in Europe you are based, but Stripe covers most of it (https://stripe.com/global). You can also use Thrive Apprentice together with MemberPress, Wishlist Member or Member Mouse, if any of those support payment systems you can access.

Thank you for providing this new integration, but I would rather use ThriveCart than SendOwl with Thrive Apprentice. ThriveCart also does EU VAT and has an affiliate program, so I think it would fit the bill.

ThriveCart does indeed have some good features. I’m not sure if we could build the same kind of integration that we were able to create with SendOwl. But the main reason I think it’s not “beginner friendly” is the high price.

Great solution, Shane. As I told you before, I wish I had this before making the move to Teachable, which is quite a good platform, kind of an all in one solution. However, I don´t own it and rules can change down the road.

At this time, it would require loads of effort to move back from Teachable to my WP Site, but this is definitely something I need to plan on doing at some point.

I would also need to host my PDF, audio and video files elsewhere, but even then the overall operating cost would be much lower.

Thanks again for all your efforts, providing the right tools for digital entrepreneurs, like me.

Thank you for your comment, Luis! It can indeed be a bit scary when you don’t own the platform. But on the other hand, if you have a solution that works for you, then it works for you and you might as well make use of it. Hopefully, it will keep working for you without any bad surprises down the road.

I actually purchased LearnDash over a year ago, along with a payment option, etc.. Produced a short course, but couldn’t make the integration work, so put the course on Udemy. Now, in the process of producing another course. Going to try this solution, as I’m frankly thrilled that you folks produced it. As a TT member, I have little to lose by trying this stack. Course should be up in January, so I’ll let you know.

Offering courses is a complete nightmare especially with VAT nowadays. I went with a WordPress solution but it does give you extra headaches if your site goes offline. In the end my current route is a course platform similar to Udemy where I get 96% of sale price for my own referrals. This is hassle free and also gives most revenue. Downside is that my referral link may not always work or people may switch device and that you can’t email your customers directly. The Sendowl and Apprentice combination looks promising!

Yep, it’s gotten more complicated for sure. To me, the “you can’t email your customers” part is the biggest downside of what you describe. I can’t imagine how different my business (and life) would be if I’d never been able to email my customers.

BTW, what the lapel (lavalier) mic you are using or recommend?
What tool do you use for video recording and editing – are you on windows?
How did you create the black backdrop behind you – is it physical or simulated using your editing tool?
Do you have any blog post or article where you recommed video creation tools, both, hardware and software?

Hey guys, very much looking forward to getting sendowl and integrating it with Thrive Apprentice. I watched the webby and I think you’ve done an amazing job bringing all these things together and I agree with your premise re: the main problems launching a paid course on WP… yeah, it’s a bummer, so bravo to you guys for dilligently working on this.

Right now my only Christmas wish for this monster solution you guys have put together and something that would turn my 8/10 recommendation into a solid 10 would be for some better UI/UX layouts (templates?) on Thrive Apprentice courses and pages. They look relatively neat but are fairly clunky on the UX side and right now I feel they’re falling short of many tools out there (even ClickFunnels has better course layouts TBH). Any chance some new templates or layouts are coming down the pipes? :)

Shane this sounds wonderful, I just spent a week trying t get Wishlist and Thrive Apprentice to work would Sound Owl protect my Apprentice courses or am I off thinking that is what you were talking about. I just love apprentice and refuse to leave it. —- oh never mind I just listened to integration to Wishlist to Send owl brilliant!!! THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! HAPPY DANCE IN Eastern Iowa. :-)

Like any solution, SendOwl + Apprentice doesn’t cover every possible use case. And the affiliate system is very basic, for sure. What I’m hoping is that it’s a good enough solution for most people, especially those just starting out.

The main thing I dislike about ClickBank is that they take a pretty hefty fee on top of the payment processing fees. I also didn’t like their checkout page for a long time, but I’m not sure what that looks like now.

Absolutely agree that you have to own and control your course platform. I too searched for a solution (and tried many solutions) over the years before settling on a plugin called a Learndash. My needs were more complex than what Apprentice offers as I need completion certificates and auto marked assessments included. I looked at Sendowl (I use WooCommerce now) and it looked great – nice and clean. Unfortunately it doesn’t integrate with Learndash :(

Love the idea of Thrive Apprentice. Your choice to go outside of wordpress and use tables on the plugin is disappointing.
Why choose to lock it out of use by member plugins which use the standard posts/pages?

Thanks Shane, great summary of the recent webinar and I’m pretty much “sold” on the concept.
I’ve been struggling over the Summer with the same issues and ended up hosting my first online course on Thinkific.

I definitely want to transition to your solution (I already have Thrive Apprentice), but there’s one more thing you didn’t mention in your video, which still needs to be taken into account: where to host the associated videos.

While Thrive Apprentice + SendOwl seems reasonable, for all that you talked about, video hosting services like Wistia and Vimeo feel expensive when I’ve only just started to sell my course – and I can’t predict whether it will sell well enough to cover the cost of said solutions.

Wistia is definitely too expensive for a small business. I think Vimeo Plus is reasonably priced and a good solution for course creators. Another option is to use Amazon S3 and the native WordPress video player to deliver your videos. This will be cheaper, but more technical and the streaming experience of your viewers won’t be as good, unless you use CloudFront and make sure you get the video compression and optimization right before uploading.

Hi Tim, on their pricing page, I didn’t see any mention of this about commercial videos.
It seems like the difference between pro and plus is in the ability to have a team or not.
The commercial thing that’s not available for pro is the possibility to sell access to your videos on the Vimeo platform. But for an online course seems like the Pro plan is fine.

Hi Hanne,
The bit I was referring to was the FAQ on the pricing page where it says:
“Can I upload commercial content?
Yes, but you’ll need to upgrade to Vimeo Pro, Business, or Premium.”
But do you think this is the same thing as selling access to videos on their platform, like you mentioned?

This thread seems to have been hijacked! I’m sure it wasn’t intentional, but do you have an answer to my question re Vimeo Plus vs Pro (you were recommending Plus, but the Vimeo site indicates that we have to use Pro if for commercial purposes)?

Hey Shane, I’m glad you mentioned VooPlayer. I’ve started using VooPlayer and, from my experience, it’s definitely an option worth considering. I’ve started using it for my videos. I wrote a brief summary about it here: https://posmaymedia.com/best-video-hosting/#tab-con-7

I’ve just started setting it up. So far, so good. Looks like a great solution. I’d signed up for Wishlist, but fortunately I was within the 30-day cancellation period, and hadn’t put in too much time on it.

I am curious to hear thoughts on why Membermouse is not something you would recommend?

I am planning on using membermouse/Thrive for my membership site and it does not seem like much of a headache. My main reason for wanting to use membermouse is the more advanced reporting….LTV etc…I am going to be doing a lot of paid acq so that is very important to me.

It’s a long list of issues, really. The main ones are that MemberMouse itself is not EU VAT compliant and we had to build a custom integration to make it work, the reporting doesn’t work properly for PayPal payments, it’s only integrated with one affiliate solution (iDev) which is a pretty bad solution and we’ve had to spend a lot of time fixing bugs and problems in the software ourselves.

Thanks, Shane for giving us a clear view as to why you’ve been stumped with the question of how to best create and sell online courses. I’m diving in with Thrive Apprentice and SendOwl and sincerely appreciate all the steps your team has taken to help with the integration. I feel there’s an an info empire in my future, one post, course, product, etc at a time. ????

I think I’ve been using the whole issue of how to set it all up as a procrastination tool. I’ve only just started using Thrive Themes and it is all looking great EXCEPT I really, really need drip content! I’m still looking into work arounds for this!

If you absolutely need drip content, keep in mind that there are other solutions. For example, you could use a hosted platform that allows this. Or you can use Thrive Apprentice with MemberPress, Wishlist Member or MemberMouse and integrate one of those membership plugins with an affiliate system and a tax solution like Quaderno.

The cost of such a solution goes up by a large amount, but if drip content is absolutely critical to what you want to do, maybe it’s worth it for you.

Hey Guys, Awesome solution, I found the same solution with a new Product called Thrive Cart ( obviously not part of you guys) but I do like the ring to it!! I love my thrive themes suit and I now use Thrive cart! I wonder, did you guys ever look at this?

Hi Shane, I admire the fact that you can be neutral to your clients about the choices they make in choosing products even when they are not necessarily buying what you recommend. I think you genuinely just want to solve their problems, and it shows. In that same vein, I think it will be enormously useful if you created a review of two of the most talked about WordPress LMS solutions -LearnDash and LifterLMS – and compare Thrive Apprentice/Send Owl solution with them, feature by feature. And make it truly objective, not one of those comparions where people make their own products look superior by comparison! I think it will help people in creating their own LMS solutions and many, of course, will choose Apprentice.

Hi Shane,
All good things come to those who wait. I’ve been researching and struggling with this for such a long time. I recently took your advice and switched to WPX, and I’m so happy I did. Now I look forward to 2019 with a good option for payment and VAT compliance. As someone who’s done offline courses for more than 30 years, this is a great help to make the leap to online. Thanks for all your support! Rhonda

This is true, yes. But for selling online courses, 90% of the features in MemberMouse are not needed. Plus, MemberMouse is not digital sales tax compliant. At the least, you’d have to spend the $20/month for MemberMouse plus $50/month for Quaderno plus a few hundred a year for an affiliate platform, plus whatever it costs to make all of those work together. This isn’t a great deal if all you want to do is sell a few online courses…

Have you considered using a Merchant of Record, such as FastSpring? They host your content and sell it as if it was their own, paying you the selling price less their fees. They collect the tax and also pay the tax to the relevant authorities.

in the Thrive University training you mention EU GDPR and VAT rules being incompatible. How so? I thought GDPR didn’t stop you holding data on *customers* that is needed to run your business, only *contacts* you want to email market to.

Also, isn’t MOSS to do with B2C sales, and even then when most of the course is automatic, so coaching and live might be treated differently? Does SendOwl also handle B2B, where the reverse charge mechanism applies, and VAT is paid locally by the EU-based client, and you don’t charge it?

For EU VAT, the business must collect 2 pieces of evidence to prove a customer’s location or residency. In order to cover this, the business is forced to track more than 2 data points. For example, you basically have to track the visitor’s geographic location via IP and then also ask them to confirm their country and possibly other factors. And you must have proof of all this data for all customers, for years to come, in case of an audit. However, under GDPR, you’re not supposed to collect or keep data about your visitors without their explicit consent. And you’re supposed to delete the data when asked to do so. These two laws are thus in direct conflict with each other.

Of course, the EU is fond of vague laws, so one can discuss the ifs and buts of this until the cows come home. My opinion is that both of these pieces of legislation are poorly written, by people who don’t have a clue.

Regarding B2B: if a VAT registered business buys from another VAT registered business, the purchase can be made VAT free, if the registration number of the buyer is verified. SendOwl handles this case as well.

I am loving the look of SendOwl, I use Membermouse now to sell courses on my website. I am wondering if you know why they suggest using Membermouse TOO. Couldn’t I get by with just Thrive and SendOwl for courses and memberships?

You could. It depends on what you want to accomplish. Keep in mind that SendOwl + Thrive Apprentice is made to be an affordable, as-simple-as-possible solution for selling individual courses.

So, if you want to sell one or more courses at a one time price, TA + SO is all you need. However, if you want to sell ongoing memberships with multiple membership levels, create courses with dripped content and other advanced stuff, you’ll have to use a solution like MemberMouse. There’s a tradeoff here: the more complex and advanced you want your setup to be, the more expensive and complicated the solution will be.

Valid points as usual, I will probably adopt this solution. Not perfect, but the least imperfect if you just want to start selling a few courses online.

There is one element of the system you never touch on, which is this: if you want to offer downloadable course files (videos, mp3, documents), where do you store the files? The obvious answer is Amazon S3, unfortunately they seem to have a problem accepting prepaid cards, and don’t accept Paypal (last time I checked).

I have been searching for an equivalent service that would allow me to store the files which I could then link from the course area, but so far, I haven’t found any that are suitable. Everything sounds complicated and full of technical jargon, I just want a cloud space to store big files and allow paid customers to download them, as cheaply as on AS3. It seems really odd that there isn’t a simple, straightforward service for this, I mean, there must be millions of us looking for the same thing. Do you have any recommendations?

There are definitely alternatives to Amazon S3, but they all have the same problem (as far as I know, anyway): they are made for developers. Even S3 is really overly complicated and some other solutions look even worse in that regard.

My take on this is that there are 2 solutions I’d consider:

1) If you want to sell something where the entire product consists of one or more files your customers can download, you can do this directly in SendOwl. SendOwl has the option to store and secure your files and deliver them to customers. If you want to sell only files, you should also take a look at Gumroad, which is even simpler than SendOwl (but also more limited).

2) You can host files (especially small ones) directly on your WordPress site. There’s no protection, but I wouldn’t worry about that. If I’m selling an online course consisting of video lessons and such and there are also some downloadable files, I don’t mind if those files aren’t protected, since they’re only an add-on to my course.

Aloha Shane, I’m preparing to get an online course together and noticed that you mentioned that if one needs to drip content this may not be the best solution after all, my Q is what are examples of drip content? I’m new at this and want to be aware of what I may or may not need in a platform, thanks!

Drip content means that you create a course with, say 10 lessons, but you don’t give your customers access to 10 lessons right away. Instead, maybe they get only 1 lesson at first and then you automatically give them access to one new lesson every week. Many membership systems let you set up a time-delayed course delivery like this, but the Thrive Apprentice + SendOwl solution isn’t suitable for this.

With SendOwl, you can only protect courses in Thrive Apprentice. For post and page protection, you’d have to use a membership plugin that integrates with SendOwl as well.

However, you can also have SendOwl deliver protected downloadables directly. I don’t think this can be combined with membership or Thrive Apprentice on a single purchase, though. The Thrive Apprentice + SendOwl solution definitely isn’t the perfect solution for every case, but we wanted to create something affordable and relatively simple for anyone who just wants to sell individual online courses. That’s the use case this is built for, right now.

First, I want to Thank You for bringing us this solution… I know you’ve been digging around for a workable stack for quite some time!

The problem of putting all these things together has kept me from doing what I really want to do, which is creating eCourses that are value-driven, well put together, with the ability to have affiliates and be compliant.

This all needs to be conversion focused of course, right down to the UX when following through with a purchase. The SendOwl checkout has an appealing easy flow to it.

The last thing you want to do is annoy them with a bad checkout experience and have them bail on you.

I’ve tried several of the all-in-one solutions and have not been satisfied plus I don’t like the model of not owning my own distribution hub…

Please log in again.
The login page will open in a new window. After logging in you can close it and return to this page.

>

Meet Thrive University

The Ultimate Free Resource for Building a Conversion Focused Website ( And Getting Unstuck)

Thrive University is an online learning platform that gives you access to all of our guides, courses & webinars.

Learn how to ​create websites, landing pages and opt-in forms that are built for maximum conversions, from the ground up and get an inside view of our favorite tactics and tools for growing any online business!

Thrive University is an online learning platform that gives you access to all of our guides, courses & webinars.

Learn how to create websites, landing pages and opt-in forms that are built for maximum conversions, from the ground up and get an inside view of our favorite tactics and tools for growing any online business!